When you think of movies, you think of Hoyts — at least in Australasia. Founded nearly 120 years ago, and with headquarters in Sydney, the cinema chain has a long history of adapting to change, from customer expectations to diversifying as new technologies emerge. Over the past three decades, CTO Adam Wrightson has witnessed a high concentration of that change. The switch from analog film to digital projection and sound was one thing, but over the last few years, the stakes have raised as the whole movie-going experience is now so multi-layered, and ever reliant on emerging tech.

“I’ve been very privileged over my entire career at Hoyts, and now we’re reinventing our entire digital journeys and workflows for our customers,” he says. “It started with a strategy driven by digital being the new battleground for competition.”

After Hoyts invested heavily in upgrading cinemas with reclining seats and other tangible benefits, Wrightson and his team knew any digital changes had to meet those high standards, because the journey customers go through start long before they arrive at the cinema. It has to be seamless from the first idea of planning to see a movie to the closing credits. “We want to be best in class, so that started with a strategy,” he says. “That involved not just changing some workflows, but rearchitecting our entire digital infrastructure to give us better performance, scalability, and reliability.”

Yet in an everchanging landscape, achieving operational excellence requires strong reflexes to stay balanced.

“What I’ve learned over many years in highly technical environments is that looking at all the reasons why you can’t do something kills finding a way to make it happen,” says Wrightson. “So I encourage my team to just give it a go. It doesn’t matter if it fails or if it’s not perfect. When you get momentum that drives things, you’re actually delivering something. Then that unlocks the next thing, and the next thing, and that’s what you want to do to make progress, particularly when a lot of what we do can be technically challenging at times.”

Wrightson also discusses how he and his team lead by example by balancing scalable digital architecture and traditional IT, and customizing software development. Watch the full video below for more insights.

On the mobile experience: It plays a very significant part of the user journey. More than 80% of our customers are engaging with us on a mobile device. So whenever we’re looking at streamlining the user journey, or how something is going to work, it’s all built from a mobile-first point of view, because that’s where and how our customers want to engage with us. We’ve seen instances where all of Australia wakes up and decides to go to the movies, and the first thing they do is they pick up their mobile phones and type in the website. That creates a tsunami of demand on our web environment, but they just expect it to work. Not only have we increased performance and reliability of our digital channels, but we’ve significantly reduced our Azure hosting costs as well because of the efficiencies we’ve achieved behind our new website and mobile app.

On digital retail: If I reflect on the last few years of the digital strategy, one of the key things we did was to say that trying to host our own digital gift stores is really not the way to go. So as part of the greater strategy where we we’ve redeveloped our website, ticketing, and primary consumer-facing websites and apps, we decided to move our gift stores to the online platform Shopify, which runs ecommerce stores globally. What that gave us was the reliability and scalability to give users familiarity with their user journey to buy merchandise. In our case, it’s our gift cards. It also has a lot of built-in promotional functionality that we’re able to leverage. It ended up being a great decision that enabled us to sell on social channels and a wide range of other ways that we didn’t have the ability to do before.

On change management: Company culture is hugely important. I don’t know whether it’s our industry or the culture I’ve helped build within the technology department, but we have very low turnover. I think all leaders will say your success comes from surrounding yourself with great people, and I feel like I’ve done that. I’ve got a head of development and architecture who had the forethought to think about where we needed that strategy to be, what we needed to achieve, and giving people the autonomy and support to do what they’re good at. This is what breeds great outcomes and a great culture for success. It’s all built around trust. Of course, it also comes with challenging those people to go beyond whatever it is you set out to do. If you stretch those goals, then ultimately you achieve more than what you want to achieve. I think that’s what people also enjoy. They want to know not only that they have clear objectives of what to achieve, but how their achievements are going to impact the bigger picture.

On leadership: Like any major change, it’s about having buy in from the rest of the C level and other executives in the business, as well as working closely with peers to achieve what they want as well. So I’m close with my director of marketing, who also looks after content and corporate sales, so she’s the primary stakeholder when it comes to our digital customers and overall digital strategy. Then we also have the CEO, who, of course, also has a very clear vision of what he wants to achieve and expectations around delighting our customers at every touch point. So he’s been the one to challenge and drive the agenda on that digital strategy. And I think him pushing us to identify how digital would be the next battleground for our business has helped us drive toward delivering the best possible outcome for our customers. We want to be the best in class with digital experiences, and when we started this digital strategy a few years ago, we probably weren’t where we wanted to be in relation to our competition. Looking back now, I think we have it, and that’s all been driven by a combination of those influences from the culture we’ve built, right through to the influence of other executives in our senior leadership team.

On AI: CIOs and businesses everywhere are all under pressure about how AI is going to help you and the business. There’s lots of hype but there’s also some really good use cases coming from it. What’s on the horizon for us is being totally focused on the customer experience, and leveraging AI to enhance how to make it easier to find what they want to see at the movies, encourage them to come and see it, find the appropriate times, and guide them through that journey. We’ve got some very interesting stuff in the pipeline all centered around how to make that customer journey better. We’ll continue to push the envelope on making it easier for the customer in how they interact with our business, whether it’s buying food and beverage, or understanding what movies are coming they might want to see. That’s where our focus will be in the next six months.